Top 50 Global Business Buzzwords of 2013 represent some six continents, which continues to confirm the ever-expanding nature of the English language.”

Methodology: GLM’s Word of the Year and Business Buzzwords of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion people. To qualify for these lists, the words, names, and phrases must be found globally, have a minimum of 25,000 citations. and the requisite ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ of usage. Depth is here defined as appearing in various forms of media; breadth that they must appear world-over, not limited to a particular profession or social group or geography.

GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 375,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.

The Top Business Buzzwords of 2013 follow Rank / Word / Comments

Content — Far and away the No. 1 BizBuzz leader

Social Media — Reality: Social media impacts less than 15% of the Web

Sustainability – No. 1 Word in 2007; have been rising in BizBuzz every year

Game changer – A step below a paradigm-shift but exaggeration nonetheless

Pro-active – Evidently better than amateur-active

30,000 ft level – Let’s decide if we are viewing the topic from the 30,000-, 40,000-, or 100,000 ft level. Airlines actually fly at a 35,000 ft cruise level

Out-of-the-Box (experience) – OOBE is number 25 on the list of TrendTopper

Resonate – produce or be filled with a deep, full, reverberating sound, belief or emotion

Monetize – The attempt to transmute Internet lead into gold.

Double Down – To double an investment in an already risky proposition

Deliverable – An output, product, result, or outcome; a term of great flexibility.

110% — We believe it’s time to synchronize the exertion scale. As a hiring manager how do you compare 110% from an Ivy school with an exertion level of 130% from the Big Ten?

Multi-task – Swapping in and out of tasks quickly is the key to multi-tasking not doing many things as once which actually decreases productivity (as imagined by Dave Nelson and other tech industries in the 1970s).

Rocket science – One step up (or down) from a guru; equivalent to a Brain surgeon).

Ballpark – Another name for a ‘guesstimate’.

Flounder – In history a fish found plentifully off the coast of New England, while a ship might ‘founder’ along it’s rocky coastline. Over time the act of foundering became collated with the fish. Your grasp of the language is telegraphed by this confusion.

As if it was — As if it were, please. You know, conditional voice.

In the Cloud — Yes, dwelling within the Cloud merits a special mention.

Net-Net – Consider a sportswriter for the Brooklyn Nets basketball team: “The net-net for the Nets was the netting of the final shot.”

Herding cats – Used in high tech circles for several decades regarding controlling headstrong engineers, a seemingly improbable task.

Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.

AUSTIN, Texas, August 8, 2013 – The words ‘phony’, ‘the Optic’, and ‘Brycgwyrcende’* have joined the battle for 2013 Top Word of the Year, according to the Global Language Monitor, the world leader in big data language analytics.

The Mid-year outlook for the Top Trending Words of 2013 already include words related to: Kate’s Royal Offspring, Near-Earth Objects including Comets, asteroids and/or meteors, Nukes (rogue or otherwise), a fascinating Internet meme (or two), China continuing in it role as the world’s economic engine, an unknown technical buzzword that will seemingly spring out of nowhere (ala #hashtag), and various catastrophic scenarios with names containing the prefix franken- or the suffix – pocalypse

These words have been compiled from word trends in global English currently tracked by the Global Language Monitor. In December 2012, Austin, Texas-based GLM announced that ‘ Apocalypse’ was the Top Word, ‘Gangnam Style’ the Top Phrase; and ‘Newtown’ and ‘Malala (Yousafzai) the Top Names of 2012 in its annual global analysis of the English language.

“With 1.83 billion speakers and a new word created every 98 minutes or so, clever, interesting, and creative neologisms inevitably appear — and now from any point on the planet,” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of GLM.

Apocalypse is the Top Word

Gangnam Style is the Top Phrase

Newtown AND Malala Yousafzai are the Top Names of the Year

Global Language Monitor’s 13th Annual Survey of Global English

Number of Words in the English Language: 1,019,729.6 (January 1, 2013 estimate)

AUSTIN, Texas December 27, 2012 — The Global Language Monitor has announced that ‘Apocalypse’ is the Top Word, ‘Gangnam Style’ is the Top Phrase and Newtown AND Malala Yousafzai are the Top Names of 2012 in its 13th annual global survey of the English language.

Apocalypse was followed by deficit, Olympiad, Bak’tun, and meme. Rounding out the top ten were MOOC, the Cloud, Omnishambles, Frankenstorm, and obesogenic.

“Apocalypse (Armageddon, and similar terms) reflects a growing fascination with various ‘end-of-the-world’ scenarios, or at least the end of life as we know it. This year the Mayan Apocalypse was well noted, but some eight of the top words and phrases were directly related to a sense of impending doom.” said Paul JJ Payack, President of the Global Language Monitor.

“Our top words, phrases and names this year represent some five continents, which continues to confirm the ever-expanding nature of the English language.”

(See more on Apocalypse and Armageddon after the Top Words List.)

The Top Words of 2012 follow Rank/ Word / Comments

Apocalypse / Armageddon, and variations thereof — The word Apocalypse has been in ascendance in the English for more than 500 years. However,recent years has witnessed an unprecedented resurgence of the word.

Deficit — Looks like deficit-spending will plague Western democracies for at least the next decade. Note to economists of stripes: reducing the rate of increase of deficit spending actually increases the deficit.

Olympiad — The Greeks measured time by the four-year interval between the Games. Moderns measure it by medal counts, rights fees and billions of eyeballs.

Bak’tun — A cycle of 144,000 days in the Maya ‘Long Count’ Calendar. This bak’tun ends on December 21, 2012, also being called the Mayan Apocalypse. (Actually Maya ‘long-count’ calendars stretch hundreds of millions of years into the future, December 21st merely marks the beginning of a new cycle.)

Meme — Internet Memes can best be conceived as thoughts or ideas rather than words, since they can and often do encompass sounds, photos, and text. Memes are propagated through every imaginable form of electronic communications, eventually surfacing in the traditional print and electronic media.

MOOC — Massive Open Online Course; the nature of higher education is changing and MOOC is the phenomenon to watch.

The Cloud — Neither the play by Aristophanes nor a forgotten title by Hitchcock, but rather where your data heads after you press <enter>.

Omnishambles — From the UK and the top word of the Oxford American Dictionary team, where everything, everywhere seems to be in a state of disarray.

Frankenstorm — Superstorm’s Sandy’s colloquial name. From a meteorologist’s lips to a globally recognized neologism within a few hours.

Obesogenic — An environment that tends to encourage obesity. Lately it has been used to describe television advertisement that promote sugary and high-calorie snacks to kids.

Hen — The Swedish attempt to create a gender-neutral pronoun to replace him or her or combinations thereof: hen.

Derecho — A ‘land hurricane,’ a sudden storm with extremely strong, one-directional winds, such as the storm that swept from the Midwest into the Washington, D.C. area earlier this year.

Hashtag — The ‘pound sign’ reborn as the all-powerful Twitter hash tag; what next a re-branding of the period as a ‘full stop’.

Drones — Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) that are piloted remotely or by on-board computers; mostly used for military applications.

Fracking — The extraction of fossil fuels by hydraulic fracturing in rock formations, and injecting fluids to force the release of hitherto inaccessible hydrocarbons.

Phobes — The Loyal Opposition? How 19th c. of you. Opponents (of either side) are now cast as fear-filled and hateful phobes or haters.

Superfood — An non-scientific term used to describe foods that are calorie sparse and nutrient dense.

The 47 — Presidential candidate Mitt Romney characterization of the percentage of Americans who pay no Federal taxes.

YOLO — You Only Live Once meant to convey derision or astonishment.

Adorkable — The rise of the Nerds! A portmanteau word from dork and adorable.

The words Apocalypse and Armageddon are intermixed in the current English language media. New words or neologisms are created with both stems all referring to some type of ‘end-of-the-world-type’ phenomena. Both words stem from the final book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation in which the final battle between good and evil (Armageddon) is revealed (apokalyptein).

Apocalyptic terms are combination or ‘portmanteau’ words linking a root word with ‘apocalypse’ such as the Snowpocalypse in the Washington, D.C. area several years ago mentioned by President Obama. Apocalypse, itself, can be traced to the ancient Greek word apokalyptein meaning to ‘uncover, restore, reveal or disclose’ (hence the name of the final book of the New Testament. The Book of Revelation). The words apocalypse and apocalyptic are both frequent expressions of the global media especially when used in reference to any cataclysmic event such as the South Asian Tsunami or the inundation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, as GLM then noted.

Terms related to Armageddon are also portmanteau words that ultimately can be traced to the same source. The Greek word Harmagedōn and its Hebrew counterpart har məgiddô both refer to the ancient settlement of Megiddo. Megiddo stood astride important Middle Eastern trade routes and was subsequently the scene of many battles in Biblical times. The word ‘Armageddon’ has come to be associated in the popular mind with any end-of-the-world scenario, such as portrayed in the movie of the same name, starring Bruce Willis, or the ‘Carmageddon’ event in Los Angeles, where one of the main freeways was shut down for a number of hours.

Methodology: GLM’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.83 billion people. To qualify for these lists, the words, names, and phrases must be found globally, have a minimum of 25,000 citations. and the requisite ‘depth’ and ‘breadth’ of usage. Depth is here defined as appearing in various forms of media; breadth that they must appear world-over, not limited to a particular profession or social group or geography.

GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 275,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.

The Top Phrases of 2012

Rank / Phrase / Comment

Gangnam Style: A South Korean YouTube video watched 1,000,000,000 times around the world cannot be ignored because it might be considered frivolous.

Global Warming/Climate Change – No. 1 phrases for the first decade of the 21st century; still resonate well into its second decade.

Fiscal Cliff — Sharp automatic tax increases and spending cuts to U.S. Federal programs that go into effect with the new year — if the Budget Control Act of 2011 is not addressed.

The deficit—the difference between what the government takes in and what it spends—is projected to be reduced by roughly half in 2013

God Particle — The ever-elusive Higgs Boson, the search for which, according to CERN, carries a 1 in 50,000,000 of creating a mini Black Hole that just might swallow the Earth. Oops.

Rogue nukes — Iran and North Korea are the focus of attention again.

Near-Earth Asteroid — Yet another year, another asteroid, another near-miss; this one slipping between the orbits of the Earth and the Moon.

Binders Full of Women — Any unfortunate misstatement or turn of phrase, especially when viewed by some 50 million in a US Presidential Debate becomes immediately meme-worthy.

Arab Spring — Still no Successor term as the Arab Spring morphs into something far more ominous.

London Olympics — A triumphal return to the Olympic stage that would have astounded those present at the first Post-War Games in 1948.

Higgs Boson — The long-sought particle theorized to have been present at the creation, is confirmed in CERN experiments. (And, yes, Dr. Higgs, has lived to see confirmation of his conjecture.)

Europe (E.U. / Eurogeddon) — United, breaking apart, saving the Euro, abandoning the Euro, with the UK again as an ‘interested onlooker’. How do you say ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ in German.

Felix Baumgartner — Austrian Felix Baumgartner becomes the first skydiver to break the speed of sound, reaching a maximum …

Senkaku Islands — No one actually cares about these rocky, inhospitable outcroppings; it’s the mineral rights under surround seas of concern here.

John Roberts — Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court at the center of the upholding of the Affordable Healthcare Act (or Obamacare).

Bibi (Benjamin Netanyahu) — The current Prime Minister of Israel.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — The current president of Iran, a largely ceremonial post.

Christopher Stevens — Ambassador to Libya, gunned down at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

Angela Merkel — The chancellor of Germany attempting to hold together the currency union and avoid the Eurogeddon.

Top Words of the Decade

The Top Words of the Decade Global Warming, 9/11, and Obama outdistanced Bailout, Evacuee, and Derivative; Google, Surge, Chinglish, and Tsunami followed. Climate Change was top phrase; Heroes was the top name.

2001:
Top Word: Ground Zero
Top Phrase: ‘Lets Roll’
Top Name: The Heros

2000:
Top Word: Chad
Top Phrase: Dot.com
Top Name: W (Dubya)

About The Global Language Monitor

Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.

For more information, call 1.512.815.8836, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.

.

From the TimesRepublican

December 30, 2012

By WES BURNS – (wburns@timesrepublican.com)

Shakespeare once said: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

I know that, technically, Juliet said it. But she isn’t real; plus, I like to picture Shakespeare as the kind of guy that would loudly recite his own writing, trudging about his house at night hurling empty bottles into the fire place and generally annoying the neighbors.

But Juliet/Shakespeare/Imaginary Alcoholic Shakespeare has a point. Just how important is a name? For that matter, how important is a word? Sure, we call that delicious brown spice “cinnamon” but would our world be inexorably different if we called it some gibberish word like “torpin” or “churdally” or “blomkamp?”

You know, it might be. I don’t think I could start off my day with a hearty bowl of Blomkamp Toast Crunch.

And Shakespeare is proven wrong by breakfast cereal, once again.

Sorry to tell you, Willie Shakes, but the word is important. Very important. In fact they pass that most important of litmus tests; words are worth fighting over.

Now, I’m not talking about some hoary old clich about going to war over words; nor am I talking about some Walter Houston-esque prospector claiming your choice of words indicates a scuffle is to commence, right after long-shotting a spittoon from across the bar.

I’m talking about that most blood thirsty and ruthless of all battles: The All-Austere Blue Blood English Language Throwdown! 2012 HD Remix edition!

In one corner we have the old guard dictionary powerhouse Merriam Webster. The premiere league lexicographers at Merriam-Webster (a place I imagine smells of wig powder and silent racism) have been telling us what words are actually words and what words are “gutter speak” for 500 years. I totally fact checked that statement, you can bring it up in conversation later, free of repercussion.

In the other corner we have The American Dialect Society, which I’m pretty sure is a cover group for some kind of James Bond villain. American Dialect Society? That sounds WAY too benign to be real; these guys are hiding a laser in a mountain somewhere.

And in the um THIRD corner we have the Global Language Monitor, which I assume is some kind of super computer.

All three of these fierce warriors of the word are fighting for the same prize: The title of Word of the Year.

You see, each of these venerable groups, plus Google, put out a list around this time of year where they pick a word they feel best describes the year as a whole. With such venerable institutions such as Merriam Webster and Global Language Bot 3000 you can imagine that the words succinctly sum up the year at large.

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2012? Socialism and Capitalism.

OK, so right out of the gate you guys are falling behind. You have two words for your “WORD of the year” entry and the two words you picked seem to have been randomly pulled out of a freshmen civics class. I’d imagine in a year full of natural and man-made disasters a lot of people didn’t really care about either, more so they just wanted their power back, or to not drown.

Alright, Merriam-Webster has only been at this since 2003 and I’m certain those tea-sippers look down upon the Internet with the same disdain they feel for what they still call the horseless carriage.

How about the American Dialect Society? They’ve been picking a “Word of the Year” since 1990 so they have to be well ready for action. And the American Dialect Society’s pick for “Word of the Year?”

What? They don’t announce it until the middle of January? Who waits until the next year to write the year in the review? Do they think some amazing word is going to come along on Dec. 29 and blow away the prospective title holder “Boo-Boo?”

The Global Language and Target Neutralization Robot has chosen “Apocalypse” as its “Word of the Year,” in a move that should terrify no one.

And what of the latest contender for “Word of the Year” kingmaker status, the good folks at Google? Their “Most Searched Word” cuts through the byzantine selection process of dictionary committees and killer robots and replaces it with some good old fashioned math.

The number one most searched word in 2012? Facebook. Oh, and number three is Yahoo.

People go to Google and search for Yahoo.

—

You know what? Global Language Murder Bot is right, Apocalypse is the Word of the Year. Which means I can already tell you the 2013 Word of the Year: Goodbye.

—

Wes Burns is a Sunday columnist. The views expressed in this column are personal views of the writer and don’t necessarily reflect the views of the T-R. Contact Wes Burns at 641-753-6611 or wburns@timesrepublican.com.

‘

Number of Words in the English Language: 1,016,672 (July 6 estimate)

AUSTIN, Texas July 10 – Trending 2012 Update: Obesogenic, Derecho (and the gender neutral ‘hen’) are taking on the Mayan Apocalypse, Kate, and Debt as candidates for the Top Word of the Year according to a mid-year update by the Global Language Monitor. Each year, GLM produces the top trending words for the following year just before the new year begins. In 2011, it announced 12 possible candidates; mid-way through the year the three new terms have been added to the list.

Obesogenic — An environment that tends to encourage obesity. Lately it has been used to describe television advertisement that promote sugary and high-calorie snacks to kids.

Derecho — A ‘land hurricane,’ a sudden storm with extremely strong one-directional winds, such as occurred in the Eastern states earlier this month.

Hen — The Swedish attempt to create a gender-neutral pronoun to replace him or her or combinations therefore: hen.

“The new words are taken from an intensifying debate on obesity as a major societal health crisis, a ‘land Hurricane’ that some link to global warming. and a move sometimes viewed as political correctness to end gender distinction among pronouns,” said Paul JJ Payack, the president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “At 2012’s mid-point, there has been considerable movement among the top trending words, and that trend will no doubt continue as it has during the entire life of our 1400-year old language.”

3. The Election (6) — No Obama-mania this time around, more of an Obama-ennui for the November 6 elections.

4. Kate (2) — There are seven billion humans on the planet but sometimes it seems that it’s all about Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton in terms of fashion, celebrity, and the royal line. (And most definitely not Katie, the future ex-Mrs. Tom Cruise.)

5. Deficit (7) — Looks like deficit-spending will plague Western democracies for at least the next decade.

6. Global Warming (10)— The earth has been warming since New York was covered under a mountain of ice; what makes 2012 any different?

7. Derecho (New) — A ‘land hurricane,’ a sudden storm with extremely strong one-directional winds, such as occurred in the Eastern states earlier this month.

8. Olympiad (2) — The Greeks measured time by the four-year interval between the Games. Moderns measure it by medal counts, rights fees and billions of eyeballs.

9. CERN (9) — Neutrons traveling faster than light? The ‘God Particle’? The world ending in a mini-black hole? All these somehow revolve around CERN (The European Center for Nuclear Research). One CERN scientist calculated that the chance of a mini-Black Hole swallowing the Earth is less than 1 in 50,000,000. Somewhat comforting until you realize this is about ten times more likely than winning a national lottery.)

10. Rogue nukes (8)— Iran and North Korea will be the focus of attention here.

11. Near-Earth Asteroid (11) — Yet another year, another asteroid, another near-miss. (However, one does strike the Earth every one hundred million years or so.)

13. Bak’tun (4) — A cycle of 144,000 days in the Maya ‘Long Count’ Calendar. This bak’tun ends on December 21, 2012, also being called the Mayan Apocalypse. (Actually Maya ‘long-count’ calendars stretch hundreds of millions of years into the future, December 21st merely marks the beginning of a new cycle.)

15. Hen (New) — The Swedish attempt to create a gender-neutral pronoun to replace him or her or combinations thereof: hen.

16. Obesogenic (New) — An environment that tends to encourage obesity. Lately it has been used to describe television advertisement that promote sugary and high-calorie snacks to kids.

The Top Words for 2011: ‘Occupy’ was the Top Word, ‘Arab Spring’ the Top Phrase and ‘Steve Jobs’ the Top Name of 2011 in its twelfth annual global survey of the English language.

GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time.

NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 250,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources as they emerge.

Occupy is the Top Word of the Year,

Arab Spring is the Top Phrase of the Year and

Steve Jobs is the Top Name of the Year

Global Language Monitor’s 12th Annual Survey of Global English

.

AUSTIN, Texas December 6, 2011 (Updated from November 10) — The Global Language Monitor has announced that ‘Occupy’ is the Top Word, ‘Arab Spring’ the Top Phrase and ‘Steve Jobs’ the Top Name of 2011 in its annual global survey of the English language. Occupy was followed by deficit, fracking, drone, and non-veg. Kummerspeck, haboob, 3Q, Trustafarians, and (the other) 99 rounded out the Top 10.

“Our selections this year, to a large extent, reflect the ongoing political and economic uncertainty that seems to be affecting much of the developed world – with notable exceptions such as the Royal wedding and the continuing rise of China ,” said Paul JJ Payack, President of the Global Language Monitor.

“Our top words, phrases and names this year come from five continents… confirmation of the ever-expanding influence of the English language.

“The words are culled from throughout the English-speaking world, which now numbers more than 1.58 billion speakers. The Global Language Monitor’s Word of the Year rankings are based upon actual word usage in the English speaking world.

“In global English, words are not bestowed upon, agreed upon, or voted upon by cultural or academic elites but, rather, words are defined from the bottom up, that is, by the people themselves — and this is true whether in the East End of London, or south-central LA, the projects in Brooklyn, the slums of Kingston, the call centers of Mumbai, the streets of Singapore, the text messages out of Shanghai, or the fashion districts of Sydney.”

GLM employs its NarrativeTracker technologies for global Internet and social media analysis. NarrativeTracker is based on global discourse, providing a real-time, accurate picture about any topic, at any point in time. NarrativeTracker analyzes the Internet, blogosphere, the top 75,000 print and electronic global media, as well as new social media sources.

7. Haboob – A name imported from the Arabic for massive sandstorms in the American Southwest.

8. 3Q – Near universal term for ‘thank you’ now earning additional status after being banned from official Chinese dictionaries. Another example of the ever- increasing mixing of numbers and letters to form words.

9. Trustafarians – Well-to-do youth (trust-funders) living a faux-Bohemian life style, now associated with the London Riots.

8. President Obama – Hope and Change retreat further into the history books; the game plan is now for survival.

9. PIIGS – The nations of Portugal, Ireland, Italy Greece and Spain taken together for their untenable deficits possibly affecting the economic health of the Eurozone.

10. Yaroslavl Lokomotiv – The ill-fated elite Russian hockey team that was virtually wiped out in the crash of a three-engine Yak-42.

Top Words of the Decade

The Top Words of the Decade Global Warming, 9/11, and Obama outdistanced Bailout, Evacuee, and Derivative; Google, Surge, Chinglish, and Tsunami followed. Climate Change was top phrase; Heroes was the top name.

2001:
Top Word: Ground Zero
Top Phrase: ‘Lets Roll’
Top Name: The Heros

2000:
Top Word: Chad
Top Phrase: Dot.com
Top Name: W (Dubya)

About The Global Language Monitor

Austin-Texas-based Global Language Monitor analyzes and catalogues the latest trends in word usage and word choices and their impact on the various aspects of culture, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.

For more information, call 1.512.815.8836, email info@LanguageMonitor.com, or visit www.LanguageMonitor.com.

Eighth Annual Analysis of the Top Words from Television by the Global Language Monitor

Austin, Texas, September 20, 2011. The Global Language Monitor today announced that the ‘Royal Wedding’ of Kate Middleton and Prince William is the Top Television Word (or phrase) of the 2011 season. ‘Royal Wedding’ topped Charlie Sheen’s self-descriptive ‘Winner’ for the Top Spot. ‘Arab Spring’, ‘X-Factor’, and ‘Oprah’ rounded out the Top Five. ‘Fukashima,’ ‘9/11′, ‘Obama-vision’, ’Chicago-style pols’ and ‘Zombies’ completed the Top Ten. Surprisingly the drama surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden by Navy Seal Team 6 did not break into the No. 10.

“This apparently is shaping up to be the Year of Kate (Middleton). She has come to dominate the small screen through her engagement, her fashion choices and most of all her Royal Wedding,” said Paul JJ Payack, President and Chief Word Analyst of the Global Language Monitor. “Aside from the princess, this is the first time that ‘news’ has dominated the Top TeleWords of any given year. There are those who maintain that the pace of events is accelerating — and it does appear that social media is playing an ever-expanding role in that process.”

The awards are annually announced at the beginning of the fall television season in the US, traditionally opened with the 63rd Annual Emmy Awards. (Sunday, September 18th, 8:00 p.m. ET). This is the eighth annual analysis by the Austin-based Global Language Monitor.

The Top Telewords of the 2011 season with commentary follow:

1. Royal Wedding (Kate) — Kate reigns once more, this time on the small screen.

2. Winner (Charlie Sheen) – Winner, Tiger blood, goddesses … Fukashima was not the only meltdown on the world stage this year.

3. Arab Spring — The rolling unrest in the Middle East to some extent fueled by social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.

4. X-factor — In algebra, X is the unknown quantity or variable. In TV lingo it stands for Simon Cowell’s empire of dozens of X-factor shows around the globe.

5. Oprah – A name without precedent (or predecessor) rising to prominence because of Winfrey’s season-long farewell tour.

6. Fukashima – The epicenter for the Japanese Triple Disaster (tsunami, earthquake and nuclear meltdown).

7. 9/11 – The recent 10th year commemoration reminds that it is one of the handful of historical events whose date will actually ‘live in infamy’.

8. Obama-vision – The president’s appearances have turned increasingly more prosaic in the third year of his presidency.

9. Chicago-style politics (The Good Wife) – Rahm Emanuel vies with the Good Wife for the better rendition of a Chicago Pol’s life.

10. Zombies (The Walking Dead) – Continue to infect the world through dozens of shows on the small screen.

The Top Telewords of previous years:

2010 – SpillCam from the Gulf Oil Spill, followed by Guido (Jersey Shore) and Reality (TV)

2009 – ObamaVision — All Obama, all the time, everywhere, followed by Financial Meltdown and the death of Michael Jackson.

2008: Beijing (from the Olympics), ObamaSpeak, followed by ‘facts are stubborn things’, ‘it is what it is,’ and Phelpsian.

2007: “Surge” from the Iraq War political and military strategy, “That’s Hot®” Paris Hilton’s popular expression that is now a registered trademark, and “D’oh!” from The Simpsons and The Simpsons Movie.

2006: ‘Truthiness’ and ‘Wikiality’ from the Colbert Show followed by ‘Katrina’, ‘Katie,’ and ‘Dr. McDreamy’.

2005: ‘Refugee’ from the coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, followed by ‘Desperation’ from Desperate Housewives and ‘Camp Cupcake’ from the on-going Martha Stewart follies.

D) A lowly scrap of paper that may decide who will be the next leader of the free world?

All four answers are correct. Chad is also the name of a couple of major league baseball players and one half of a British pop-singing duo from the ’60s.

But if you guessed “D,” you are informed enough to understand the vote counting process in Florida.

Politicians are tossing the term “chad” around as if everyone were familiar with the word. Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore’s campaign adviser, George Mitchell, is among them.

“You can run those machine ballots through five times and you’ll get five different totals because the chads fall off with each count,” he said, explaining on “Fox News Sunday” the reason he believes ballots in Florida should be recounted by hand.

But Mitchell’s use of “chads” betrayed his own lack of familiarity with the word. “Chad is its own plural,” said Paul J.J. Payack, president and CEO of yourdictionary.com, which is based in California.

2. The perforated strips on the edge of paper for sprocket feed printers after they have been separated from the printed portion (also “perf,” “perfory,” or “snaf”).

Etymology: Possibly from the last name of the inventor of the Chadless cardpunch, which cut U-shapes in punch cards, rather than open circles or rectangles. (The U’s formed holes when folded back.)

“Chad” would then be a back-formation from “Chadless” misunderstood: If the Chadless keypunches don’t produce it, other keypunches must produce “chad.”

The word appears to have entered the national lexicon in the late 1940s, around the time people began to refer to “bug” as a computer glitch after a researcher blamed a moth among a group of vacuum tubes for affecting ENIAC, the primitive computer powered by thousands of such tubes, said Payack. That was also about the time when IBM began using punch cards that warned users not to fold, spindle or mutilate.

In Florida, vote-counters may have wished for a “chadometer” to measure whether a bit of chad is sufficiently dislodged to qualify it as “dangling.”

When the hand recount began in Palm Beach County, the canvassing board there said it would count a vote if any of the corners of the chad were punched.

The board then decided that they would instead use the “sunlight test” — if they could see sun through an indentation, it would count.

About a quarter of the way through the counting, however, a board member determined that the light test was flawed and told the other members to go back to the first test.

According to county spokesman Bob Nichols, there are five types of chad.

San Francisco. July 24, 2011 — We first saw the story, 15 Wonderful Words With No English Equivalent, on the MentalFloss outlet (a genuinely interesting site for esoterica lovers), compiled by Bill DeMain. His attribution states that “many of the words above can be found in BBC researcher Adam Jacot de Boinod’s book ‘The Meaning of Tingo and Other Extraordinary Words from Around the World.”

In the last few days we have tracked it thousands of times around the English speaking world, which now happens to encompass the globe. We are intrigued by the idea that there, indeed, might be no equivalent English words or phrases for these terms.

After all there are as of today, July 24th, 2011 the Global language Monitor calculates that there are approximately 1,010,649.7 words in the English language. (The language gains a new word every ninety-eight minutes, hence the, we admit, totally extraneous decimal point.)

So here’s the challenge to lovers of the language. Do these 15 Wonderful Words Actually Have No English Equivalent?

Send us your suggestions to: 15WonderfulWords@LanguageMonitor.com, and we will publish what our readers come up with.

The Global Language Monitor estimates that there are currently 1,009,753 words in the English language. Despite this large lexicon, many nuances of human experience still leave us tongue-tied. And that’s why sometimes it’s necessary to turn to other languages to find le mot juste. Here are fifteen foreign words with no direct English equivalent.

1. Zhaghzhagh (Persian)
The chattering of teeth from the cold or from rage.

2. Yuputka (Ulwa)
A word made for walking in the woods at night, it’s the phantom sensation of something crawling on your skin.